


Here’s the part where I make a joke about roses, right?

by 2ndtolastrow



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: 5+1 Things, Family Feels, Fluff, Gen, Trans Male Character, alright first fic ive been brave enough to publish let’s go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 07:02:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19145944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndtolastrow/pseuds/2ndtolastrow
Summary: Five times one of Bruce’s kids talks to him about changing their name, and one time one of them talks to him about changing theirothername.(And, somehow, it’s always while they’re eating.)





	Here’s the part where I make a joke about roses, right?

Dick is energetic, always bouncing and bounding about the manor, so when he vaults into the chair next to him with enough force to rattle them both slightly, all Bruce does is grunt slightly.

“Yeah, yeah, I shouldn’t make Alfred’s hard work even harder by making him fix the chairs. I know.” He actually sounds less petulant and more… _frustrated,_ perhaps, than Bruce had expected. 

He looks up from his newspaper, hums softly. 

“I wanna change my name,” Dick responds, crossing his arms across his chest.

Bruce raises an eyebrow, and folds the paper as he sets it down. “What’s wrong with the one you’ve got?”

“It’s a _bad word_ and that’s _dumb_ and people should stop saying my name’s an insult because it’s _my name_ and I like it.” He huffs, slumping down in his chair. His hair sticks to the back awkwardly, creating a cowlick of sorts, and Bruce cradles his amusement at the sight tight in his chest, where all the best things go.

“So you want to change how people think about it?” is all he says.

Dick looks up at him like he’s being immensely stupid, and, with all the assurance of a twelve year old boy, says, “Duh.”

Bruce snorts.

 

Jason has been shooting him nervous glances from under his hair all through lunch. He’d responded with an overwhelming, excited ‘yes’ that morning when Bruce brought up adopting him, but some part of Bruce has started to murmur that he’s changed his mind, because who’d want to stay with _him_ all the time, who’d want to be _his_ son. 

He shoves down the thought and eats his sandwich. “So Al—“

“I was—“ Jason cuts off his weak attempt at conversation, before immediately shutting his mouth. Bruce does his best to look encouraging, which is somewhat strange feeling. “I, uh, I…”

“Yes?” Bruce asks, hoping to please actually have a conversation.

“Uh, about my adoption…” Bruce’s blood runs cold. “I was, I was thinking that you know how you can change your name real easy when you get married?”

_What?_ “Uh—yes, did you—?”

“I—you know I’m a guy but—“ he cuts off again, looking down at his sandwich like it’ll give him the least awkward way of phrasing this, and it clicks.

“You were thinking about the name on your birth certificate?” Bruce had seen that name, before immediately shutting the file very hard because that was information he didn’t want to know about anyone, no matter what some people said about ‘incessant needs, despite the limits of human knowledge’ and ‘compulsions to know _everything’._

“Uh, yeah. I was hoping to maybe make it so that I would legally be Jason?” He’s still looking down at his plate, and Bruce feels proud of the information he’s about to reveal.

“You are.”

Jason chokes on air, turning to meet Bruce’s eyes for the first time since they’ve sat down. “What?”

“I did my research enough to see that your name was marked incorrectly, and I was in need of practice forging papers, so I put together new set with the proper name and gender marker.” He gives a very slight shrug, realizing that it wasn’t quite a ‘normal’ action to take.

“Oh.” Jason stays frozen in his seat for second, before flinging his body half over the table and its corner to wrap his too-thin arms around as much of Bruce as possible. It’s his turn to freeze for a long moment, before returning the hug.

 

Tim needs to slow down, if he keeps eating at that rate he’ll be puking before halfway through patrol. Bruce grunts in reproach. 

“Huh? Oh, yeah, I didn’t realize,” he says. Tim’s still learning what Bruce’s various noises (and faces) mean, but there was a guide put together recently by Dick and Barbara, so he’s gotten much more accurate with amazing speed. 

_As soon as he had something to study,_ Bruce muses, taking a bite of his own protein bar. The bats flutter about, and he watches their movements without focus.

“I wish my name weren’t so dumb,” Tim says, seemingly out of nowhere. Bruce turns to him, and raises his left eyebrow slightly. The bruise above it twinges, annoyingly. He’d overestimated how healed it was apparently.

“Wha—Oh, come on,” He yelps, and point the bar at him accusingly. “You can’t deny how nerdy ‘Timothy’ is. _Timothy._ ”

He moves on to flailing about, while in a carefully calculated balancing act straight out of Dick’s playbook: keeping the chair on only one leg. “Like, I couldn’t do much worse. ‘Albert,’ maybe, but even that’s attached to Einstein, so… I could’ve been a David! Or an Emmett! Those are good names, but noooo.”

Bruce’s face cracks into a smile, and he refuses to wince at the way his lip feels like it’s about to crack too. “Andrew.”

“Exactly!” Tim points back at him again. “Ives seemed to have no clue what I was talking about.”

 

Bruce is attempting to manage reading before his second cup of coffee, when Cassandra coughs. Being that it’s only nine in the morning, he’s fairly startled. She’s usually asleep by now, and not planning on getting up until three PM at the earliest.

She looks tired when he convinces his eyes to focus, so he isn’t surprised when she sticks to sign. “I was thinking about my name.”

He frowns for a second, squinting his eyes and letting his shoulders follow, before smoothing his face out enough to respond with the proper grammar for ASL. “What part of it?”

“My last name,” Cassandra responds, nervousness clear in the set of her shoulders and the way she bites her lip.

“If you don’t like being ‘Cain-Wayne—“ he says, forgetting himself and speaking out loud, already sure that she’d just like to be Cassandra Cain again, that the shift has been too much, that it’s just not _right,_ no matter how much they both know she’s his daughter and he’s her father; even without her saying she’d like to change it at all, he knows. Then she’s signing again, and he goes quiet.

“—I want to be C-A-S-S W-A-Y-N-E.” She smiles, just a little, and he thinks of the many, many times Barbara had declared the two of them hopeless at this. “He’s not my dad. You are.”

“Oh,” slips out of Bruce’s lips without his control, and then he draws his hands up one more time. “Yes. Of course.”

 

Duke looks faintly startled when Bruce comes in. He’s still getting used to the various schedules that they’ve all got, Bruce knows, and the two of them don’t usually end up at the same table unless it’s over a case, or during one of all-family breakfasts they’ve been trying out. Bruce looks at his coffee, gauging how much he’s got, and then at the head of the table. 

He sits down across from Duke, halfway along it. It was too much effort to go all the way, even if that is the most comfortable seat. Bruce contemplates whether or not he would scare Duke if he put his head down on the table right now. 

(Probably not, but it would make him much more likely to fall asleep before he got any food. And Alfred’s making French toast.)

“So, uh, long night?”

“Yes,” Bruce says. He nearly remarks that it’s January, before realizing what Duke had been referring to. Well, it wasn’t a lie that way either. 

He’s giving him a look now. Fuck, he’s paused too long. Fuck it, just pretend he totally has a handle on this. Bruce sips his coffee. It tastes wrong, he realizes again. That’s why he’d had so much left when he’d gotten in here.

Duke stifles a laugh. Bruce raises his right eyebrow. The left had healed wrong years ago, and he now laments its loss for expressive duties. 

“Dude, you just.” He chuckles, gesturing at the coffee. “Me and Jason switched that out for salt like last week, and you’ve just been drinking it.”

Bruce clutches at his chest with his free hand, faking horror. “My sons, they have betrayed me!” Okay, so maybe the exclamation point isn’t warranted, but he’s trying.

It is, however, apparently the wrong thing to say, from Duke’s face. “Duke? What is it?”

“Nothing, I just—“ He bites his lip, clearly unsure of the words.

“Your parents?” Bruce guesses.

“Kinda.” Duke sighs. “It’s not—I’m glad to be here, and I wouldn’t’ve said yes to you adopting me if I didn’t mean it but—“ he looks up and meets Bruce's eyes— “you’re sure I don’t have to change my name? That it’s okay for me to stay a Thomas?”

Bruce sets his coffee mug down properly, and leans in over the table. 

“I’m sure,” he says, certain in the way that only Batman can be.

 

(+1)  
They’re at dinner when Damian turns to him, and says, directly, “Robin is most often a child’s name.”

Not the public party they’d had earlier (because Damian Wayne’s eighteenth birthday had to be an affair of epic proportions, no matter what he actually enjoyed), thank goodness. He still hears someone (Tim, most likely) start choking on their food.

Bruce meets his gaze and says, equally direct, “Yes.”

“I value our partnership very much,” Damian begins, and that is where he loses control of the situation.

Jason bursts out laughing. “‘I value our partnership.’ You’re eighteen, not eighty.”

Cass snorts, and Bruce gets the feeling that Damian is thinking fondly of the time when she far preferred beating Jason up to laughing at his jokes from the noise he makes. (Bruce much prefers now, as that change has come alongside one in Jason’s moral code.)

“I value our partnership, but I feel—“ he attempts, valiantly, to continue.

“Oh, not so much as before?” Tim interjects, gleefully mocking. It is not unkind though, not like it would’ve been once.

“I val—“ he cuts off for the last time as Duke gives in to the laughter he’s been trying to contain, and Dick slaps his back as he does his best to remain serious. “Ggrahh!”

Bruce lets out a slight, amused snort at the sound, barely more than a puff of a air. By the time Damian is actually looking at him, he’s smoothed his face over. “Do you have some concepts?”

“I, ah, yes, Father.” Damian bites his lip. “But maybe not until the end of this year’s summer break?”

“Of course not.”


End file.
